I Was Voted Best Hair in High School. By 25, I Was Balding. Here's Exactly How I Grew It Back.

“I wore hats everywhere and pretended it was a style choice. Then I found out why I was losing my hair, and why every treatment I'd already tried was never going to stop it.”

I Wore Hats For Years And Called It A Style

That photo on the left is senior year of high school. My graduating class voted on it.

I was the kid who made his mother drive him to salons instead of barbershops. I brought reference photos to appointments. I played soccer with a ponytail. My hair wasn't a feature of my life. It was most of how I recognized myself.

The picture on the right is a few years later, at Michigan State. My hairline started moving in my second year, and it moved fast.

Every morning I checked the pillow. Every shower, the drain. Every mirror, a little more scalp than the week before.

I was twenty years old and doing math on my own head.

I thought I'd never get another date. I felt like a shell of a human.

I'm moving through this part quickly, because you already know it. If you're reading a page like this one, you've run your own version of those mornings, and you don't need me to describe your life back to you.

What you probably haven't been told is why it's happening.

So let me tell you what I tried first, because I promise it looks like your list.

I Started With The Two Approved Drugs. I Ended Up In An Operating Chair.

My mother is a pharmacist. There are three medical doctors in my family. I didn't have to go looking for advice. It came to me at Thanksgiving.

In 2001 they told me what everyone gets told: minoxidil and finasteride. Then, as now, the only two drugs approved for hair loss.

I used them religiously. Not casually. Religiously. My hair loss got worse anyway.

So I did what you do next. Every shampoo on the market. Every hair vitamin. Herbs I was importing from China because a book said they worked. I read the books too.

Then somebody told me a transplant was the only real answer, so I had one.

And I kept losing my hair.

I want to be careful here, because transplants are real surgery done by real surgeons and the technique has come a long way. A transplant moves hair from where you still have it to where you don't. It was never designed to stop hair loss, and it does not. If the cause is still running underneath, you'll be back in that chair.

Years, real money, and a surgery. I was worse off than when I started, and the one thing nobody had ever given me was an explanation.

That was the point where I stopped shopping and started reading.

Why The Ingredients That Work Aren't On Any Shelf

I stopped shopping and started reading. NCBI. PubMed. Journals. Then the patent office, because I wanted to know what was coming.

According to every article, what was coming was five years away. Hair cloning, five years. A new drug class, five years. That was the answer twenty years ago and it's the answer now.

What I did find, buried in the literature, were fatty acid complexes. Linoleic acid, oleic acid. Studies pointing to the androgen receptor of the hair follicle. Not new, not exotic, and not for sale anywhere.

That bothered me more than anything else in twenty years of looking. Why would something studied and promising simply not exist as a product?

The answer turned out to be economics.

Anything marketed for hair loss in the United States has to go through drug approval. Drug approval costs a fortune. You only recover a fortune if you hold a patent. And you can't patent something natural, something already studied in the past, or something already available as a prescription.

I packed my bags. Between 2014 and 2020 I spent more than a million dollars of my own money traveling to chemists, formulators, and manufacturers around the world. I sold my house. I sold my car. I cashed out my 401k.

I want to be accurate about my part in it.

I was the one who wouldn't stop calling them.

Everything I'm about to explain came out of that reading. It's simpler than the category makes it sound.

Hair Loss Is A Blood Supply Problem

A hair follicle is a living organ. Small, but an organ. It runs on oxygen and nutrients, and those arrive one way: blood flow.

Androgen hormones convert to DHT. Both men and women have them. DHT binds to the androgen receptor at the hair follicle, and that binding disrupts the local blood supply.

An under-supplied follicle doesn't die dramatically. It shrinks. Each cycle it produces a slightly thinner, slightly weaker hair. That's called miniaturization, and it's why thinning always comes before loss. By the time you can see it in the mirror, it's been running for years.

Thinning hair is not the problem. It's a symptom of the problem.

Which changes what a treatment has to do. You don't force a follicle to grow. You take the restriction off and let it do what it's built to do.

Now look at what minoxidil actually does.

It came out of blood pressure research. Somebody noticed patients growing hair, and that observation eventually became a hair loss drug. It's a vasodilator. It widens the vessel, more blood moves through it, and for plenty of people that's enough to notice something.

But look at where it acts. Minoxidil raises the pressure. It does nothing at all about what's restricting the flow.

That was the sentence I'd been missing for a decade. Not that minoxidil is junk. It's genuinely useful and it's in our formula. But it was one half of a two-part problem, sold as the whole answer ever since.

If you take care of the hair follicle, the hair will take care of itself.

There's a second thing about minoxidil, and it's the reason a lot of people reading this got nothing from it at all.

Why Minoxidil Half-Works For Some People And Does Nothing For Others

Minoxidil in the bottle isn't the active drug. It's a precursor. Your scalp has to convert it, using an enzyme, before it does anything at all.

How much of that enzyme you have varies from person to person. If yours is low, you can apply minoxidil correctly, twice a day for two years, and be doing nothing except getting your hopes up on a schedule.

If that was you, it isn't a verdict on your hair. It's a verdict on the formulation.

There's a way to address it. Tretinoin, a prescription retinoid, supports that same conversion. It also thins the outer layer of the scalp, so more of what you apply gets through instead of drying on the surface.

Tretinoin is prescription-only. You can't buy it in a hair product, and no over-the-counter product is allowed to combine it with minoxidil in one bottle.

At the time, that was an interesting dead end for me. It mattered enormously later.

So the question became a delivery question. How do you get any of this to a follicle sitting under a barrier built to keep things out?

Three Steps, In This Order, Because Each One Makes The Next One Possible

Everything I just described is happening under your skin.

The epidermis is a barrier. It's built to keep things out. Think of an orange peel. Whatever you put on top of it, most of it stays on top of it.

So the protocol is built backward from that fact. Three steps, and the order is the entire point.

That's the kink, removed.

With it: micronized minoxidil, milled under ten microns so it penetrates instead of sitting on the surface. Tretinoin, for the conversion problem and for absorption. Caffeine, adenosine, and niacinamide for circulation and follicle condition.

I regrew my hair at my temples doing exactly this, years before there was a company. That was the first time I believed any of it.

Nobody Would Make It, So We Spent Six Years Building The Place That Could

The formula I just described has a problem as a business.

It contains tretinoin, which is prescription-only. And it puts several actives in one bottle, which no over-the-counter product is allowed to do.

That's just what the formula is.

In this category it's normal for a brand to design a box, take the orders, and send the prescription to a pharmacy nobody there has ever set foot in. That's a supply arrangement, not a formulation. When you work that way, what your customer receives is whatever that pharmacy already makes.

This Is Medicine, Not A Supplement

That's the whole reason it took six years and a pharmacy to make. Here's what owning it actually buys you.

Our topical comes in two minoxidil strengths, 5% and 15%. Fifteen is three times the concentration of the standard 5% formulas you can buy off a shelf.

You can't buy that over the counter, and not because somebody's holding it back. The over-the-counter rules cap how much minoxidil a product can contain, and they don't allow it to be combined with the other actives in ours. A 15% formula with tretinoin in it can only exist as a prescription, compounded for one person.

So it isn't that nobody thought of a stronger formula. It's that making one legally requires a pharmacy, and we didn't have one until we built it.

Which strength you'd be on isn't something this page gets to decide. That's what the physician review is for. Some cases are a starting point, some call for more, and stronger isn't automatically the right answer for everybody.

The philosophy didn't change on the way in. Topical first. Local first. The pill is an option a physician weighs with you, never a default. There's also a full version of the protocol with no DHT blocker in it at all.

Then there's the last piece, and it's the one I think about most.

I had a pharmacist in the family and three doctors at the dinner table. In more than twenty years, not one licensed physician ever sat down, looked at my case, and told me what to do about it. I was handed a category and left to guess, the same as everybody else.

So we made that the front door. Before anything ships, a licensed physician reviews the case. They screen it against your medical history and your medications, then either approve the order or recommend a different formula.

I Never Asked Anybody To Post Their Pictures

I started a Facebook group so people could use it to compare notes with each other. I never asked anyone for a photo.

They started posting before-and-afters anyway. Then they started answering each other's questions faster than we could.

Two of them have the Adegen logo tattooed on their bodies. I still don't entirely know what to do with that.

People hide this. I did it for years, under a hat. Nobody advertises the hair product they're on, because most of the time it isn't working and they'd rather you didn't know they were trying at all.

These two put it somewhere they can't take it off.

More than 50,000 customers have used Adegen. That's nearly 100,000 orders, and close to 500,000 bottles, brushes, and rollers.

A lot of those customers arrived the way you did, at the end of a list of things that didn't work.

I'm going to let them talk, and I'm not editing out the doubts.

What Actually Happens In The First Hundred Days

I'm going to set this expectation low on purpose, because I'd rather you be pleasantly surprised than quietly angry at me in four months.

Hair grows on a cycle. The growth phase runs roughly 90 to 100 days, and no formula skips it. That makes three months the honest minimum window for visible change, and months three through six the real test.

Some people shed more in the first few weeks. That's usually cycle turnover, follicles ending an old phase and starting a new one, which pushes old hairs out on the way. It's unnerving if nobody warns you. It's not the protocol failing.

The first thing most people notice isn't new hair. It's less hair where they normally count it. The drain. The pillow. The sink.

Day 100 can be underwhelming. Our own community says that to each other constantly, more bluntly than we'd ever say it in an ad.

Then there's the part that's on you, and I'm not going to soften it.

If you're not going to do this most days for three months, the money is wasted and I'd rather you keep it. Consistency is the variable that decides the outcome. Every result on this page belongs to somebody who was boring about it.

I've been taken advantage of. I don't like it and I want to help people. The last thing I want to do is over-promise and under-deliver.

What This Actually Costs

What I've described on this page is the Complete Regrowth Kit. It's the whole protocol in one box, and a 90-day kit is four pieces:

• ARB Shampoo+, for the cleanse and exfoliate step
• Your ARB topical, in the formula the physician approves
• The Microderm Roller
• Two Scalp Exfoliation Brushes

The unit I'd point you to is 90 days, for the reason in the last section. A hair cycle doesn't care about a monthly billing convention. You can start on a monthly plan instead, and plenty of people do.

Before the number, it's worth remembering what I already paid for the version that didn't work.

I paid for a transplant. You know how that went. I was worse off than when I started, because nothing about that surgery touched the reason I was losing my hair.

People tell us the same thing in their own numbers. One customer wrote in that he'd just spent twelve thousand dollars on a transplant and wanted to keep what he had left. Another told us he was pricing flights to Istanbul before he found us.

A few things worth knowing now, because they're usually what people find out afterward.

• The roller and both brushes come with the first kit at no extra cost. They ship once, they're yours, and they're not on the recurring order, because you don't need a new roller every quarter.
• The physician review is included. There's no separate consultation fee, and there isn't a version of this where you pay for the review and then pay again for the medication.
• Ninety-day orders ship free.

And the thing I'd most want to know if I were reading this: you're buying one protocol, not four products that were never designed to work together. That's what I was doing for twenty years, and it's the most expensive way to do this that I know of.

So here's what this actually runs, and I'm not going to hand you the top of the range and let you assume that's you.

Across everybody who's started since we moved to this model, the middle of the pack is $3 per day.

Some pay less than that, because their case only calls for one piece of the protocol. Some pay more. What moves it is which formula a physician approves and how much of the protocol you actually need.

Not everybody needs the whole kit. The assessment will tell you plainly if that's your case, because I'd rather sell you the right thing than the biggest thing.

That's what HairIQ is for. It takes your pattern, your history, what you've already tried, and what you'd rather avoid. Then it weighs all of that against 160+ clinical decision rules and roughly 25,000 combinations, and recommends the protocol your case calls for. Which isn't always the biggest one.

You'll see your exact recommendation and its exact price on screen before you decide anything. Not a range, not a starting-at. The number that's actually yours.

After that, the protocol continues at the same price, so you don't run out in the middle of a cycle. You can skip a shipment or cancel from your account. If you want to change your formula, you message your physician and they review it. There's no contract.

You're Not Charged Unless A Licensed Physician Approves Your Treatment

There's no money-back guarantee on this page, and I'd rather explain that than let you wonder about it.

These are prescription medications compounded for one person. They can't be returned and dispensed to somebody else.

What we can do instead is make sure you never pay for something a physician hasn't approved.

1. You take the assessment

   You see the protocol your answers point to, with its price.

2. You place the order

   Your card is authorized. Nothing is charged yet.

3. You complete a health questionnaire

   About five minutes, online, no appointment.

4. A licensed physician reviews your case

   They screen it against your history and your medications, and either approve the order or recommend a different formula.

5. If it's approved, it ships

   The payment is captured and it ships from our US-based pharmacy. If it's not approved, the authorization is released and you pay nothing. There's no refund to chase, because there was never a charge.

Two Ways This Goes From Here

You can close this page. That's a real option, and for some people it's the right one.

Here's what that looks like, honestly, because I've lived it. Nothing happens today. Nothing happens this week. You check the pillow tomorrow morning the way you checked it this morning, and you get on with your day. Then in about a year somebody takes a photograph of you at an angle you didn't choose, and you do the math again.

That's not me trying to frighten you. It's just how this moves. Slowly enough to keep putting off, steadily enough that putting it off costs something.

The honest version: hair loss is progressive, and a follicle responds best the earlier the restriction comes off. If you've been circling this decision for months, the math doesn't improve by waiting.

Or you spend about a minute answering questions about your own head, and it stops being something you manage alone.

I'm not going to tell you what your hair is going to look like. I don't know, nobody does, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing at your expense.

What I can tell you is what changes the day you start. You stop shopping. You stop reading forum threads at midnight comparing what strangers did. You stop running experiments on yourself and hoping this is the one. There's a protocol, you follow it, and a licensed physician looks at your case before any of it ships.

In three months you'll know something instead of wondering, because you'll have actually run it properly for a full cycle. That by itself is more than most people ever get.

HairIQ is the assessment we built out of the review I never got. It asks what your pattern is, how long it's been going, what you've already tried and how that went, and what you'd rather avoid. Then it shows you the protocol your case points to, what's in it, and what it costs.

It's free. There's no account. Nothing happens until you say so, and nothing is charged until a physician approves it.

That last part is what I couldn't buy for any amount of money for twenty years. Somebody qualified, looking at my specific situation, telling me what to do about it. Here it's the first step, not the last one.

Questions People Ask Before They Start